


Rät

by ViolentVioletEye



Series: Alone Together [1]
Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, DadSchlatt, Gen, Good Schlatt, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mental Breakdown, More like regretful Schlatt, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, These Two Need Help, This is not a fixit, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Will they get it?, at least not in the way you think, but at least they have each other, everybody's fucking dead except these two, no
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 05:20:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28576650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViolentVioletEye/pseuds/ViolentVioletEye
Summary: Here, where they watched the smoldering remains of l’Manberg on the news for a week before it finally became stale news, here, where Tommy was going to school for the first time since he had been fourteen and Wilbur had dragged him away to start that goddamn doomed nation, here, where all they had was each other.Tommy hated it.Schlatt hated himself.
Relationships: Jschlatt & TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF)
Series: Alone Together [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2093832
Comments: 12
Kudos: 204





	Rät

**Author's Note:**

> Schlatt and Tommy don't deal with their trauma in a very good way in this one-shot, this is really just a vent for how I'm feeling about myself and the people around me in my life and the events that are slowly transpiring. This should no way be used as an example of how to deal with trauma. I mean, they don't do drugs or drink or anything, but they just kinda ignore it until they break and then pick up the pieces and continue to ignore it. Rinse and repeat. It's a very bad cycle, and if you're in it, please, know that you are not alone and everything will be okay one day.
> 
> TW warnings for a breakdown, unresolved trauma, and uhhhh, that should be it, lemme know if I missed anything.
> 
> This will be a series, so, give it a subscription if you want updates *thumbs up*

Schlatt opened the door and heard someone playing the guitar. He paused and listened to the tunes, heard how they were sour and angry. The person playing was following a tune, probably one he had just made that morning. Though, judging by the almost familiar tune to some of the notes, he realized he had heard him working on it for the past week. Schlatt lingered in the doorway, one hand pushed into his jeans pocket, the other gripping onto his one shopping bag. He debated on taking a walk, on just leaving the bag on the table so that if he stopped playing long enough to get hungry he could feed himself. But Schlatt knew that wasn’t right. Tensions had been rising for the past week, but not between them. Just in that lanky, blond-haired teenager that always kept everything inside until it finally spilled out.

They had done this before. Schlatt found them here a few times, usually, every day for the first week they were here, and then three times a week, before it dwindled to two, then one, then it became something that happened now and then. But that didn’t mean it was any less worrying. And it didn’t mean that he forgot how to handle this. Though it would be exhausting for both of them, it always was, he knew they would feel better in the end. And even if Schlatt didn’t, the kid would. And at the end of the day, that was all that mattered now. All they had was each other, and the kid needed Schlatt more than Schlatt would ever actually need him. Ugh. That statement was a lie. He knew it was. He had to stop doing that. He did leave the bag on the table, but he didn’t leave for a walk. Instead, he walked to the doorway to the living room where the playing was coming from. He leaned against the wood, tucking both hands into his pockets as he stared at the teenager on the couch.

Tommy had been playing for a while. He could tell because the tips of his fingers were red, and a couple was even freshly bandaged at the tips. He had been playing a lot today, to the point where he bled and he continued playing anyway. That was another easy sign to Schlatt that told him it was high time that Tommy had another breakdown. He had stopped trying to stop them. One day, maybe they would stop altogether. But for right now, the fact that they didn’t happen every week was great progress. The kid needed to let the pain out, even if it meant screaming and crying every couple weeks. So long as he did it in the privacy of their home, it would be okay. Here, they were safe. Here, no one would judge them except for themselves. But they were working on that too.

Tommy stopped playing briefly, eyes lifting to his. But then they narrowed and the flame roared in those bland blue eyes. Inwardly, Schlatt sighed. It was one of those days, then, when Tommy was angry at everyone, including the ram hybrid. That was fair. Schlatt had made plenty of mistakes. Tommy had received the blunt end of most of them. His anger was justified. Schlatt encouraged it, sometimes. Because if he wasn’t angry, then he was numb, and Schlatt knew where that path led. He had traversed it himself, and it led him to where they were now. At the end of the road, all of his mistakes shoved together in a smoldering pile of ashes and fire that was once a country.

Tommy kept playing.

Schlatt didn’t say anything.

“You dumb bitch, I loved you, I loved you,” Tommy suddenly hissed, and for a moment, Schlatt thought he was talking to him and he blinked. But then Tommy continued, and he noticed how the words fell in with the angry chords he was playing. “I loved you, it's true! I wanted to be you and do what you do.”

Ah. The kid was writing lyrics now. They weren’t bad. He wondered if he had written an entire song, or if this was the chorus and he would build off of that. Wilbur had done that.

“I lived here, I loved here!”

Schlatt gritted his teeth behind closed lips, shutting his eyes as he listened to the bitterness and anger dripping off the kid’s words. Some days, he looked like Wilbur. The guitar and the song making were a constant reminder, but sometimes he had a certain gleam in his eyes. The way he sneered reminded him of that angry British man that had fallen so far from grace. All because of Schlatt.

“I bought it, it's true…”

Schlatt’s eyes opened and he looked at Tommy’s face, saw the tears welling in his eyes and sliding down his cheeks. His hands shook and he played a sour note that didn’t fit with his angry chords. Schlatt stepped towards him. They were almost there. A plan was already whirling in his head, of how he would be able to whip up something quick for them to eat while keeping an eye on the kid. Sometimes he lashed out at the things around him. Those involved things being thrown, holes in the walls, punches accompanied with kicks thrown at Schlatt, and sometimes he was able to dodge them. At the end of the day, he had always been a conman and this teen had always been a soldier. This kid had gone through hell and come out spitting blood and raising his fists for more.

He wondered why Tommy didn’t kill him there in the remains of that country, the very one that his brother had blown up, because he had been pushed, pushed to the edge and forced to topple right over it, all because of _Schlatt._

“I'm so embarrassed,” Tommy choked out, the anger beginning to fade in his eyes. “I-I feel _abused.”_

Schlatt caught the guitar when it slipped out of the kid’s hands. He set it aside, then wrapped a strong arm around his shaking shoulders and pulled him into his chest. Tommy’s legs kicked out past his thighs, and his fists pounded against his back, but Schlatt held on and he knew Tommy was doing the same thing. His fingers dragged along his skin, slipped down his front, and then grabbed tight onto the black turtleneck sweater Schlatt wore today. Schlatt found his grip by holding onto the back of the collar of the green jacket that Tommy wore every day. The pins that were stabbed into the front clinked together, pressed their surfaces against Schlatt’s shirt so roughly he could feel the cold material through the cheap cloth. A few had been given to him by people at school. Tommy himself had bought most. Only three were given to him by Schlatt. The first was a music note, he didn’t know what kind because music had never been his thing but Wilbur’s, the second a pig, and the third a bee.

Very on the nose. He hadn’t done it to spite the kid. He had seen him staring at them at the gas station they always went to for kerosene and cheap dinners in the form of sandwiches cut in triangles and stuffed into plastic bags. He had gotten them for him when he had put some overtime in at work to afford rent that month and he had a couple of bucks left over. The kid had gripped them so tightly when he had handed them to him, so tightly Schlatt wondered if they would break. Or if he’d throw them back in his face, scream his justly deserved rage. But he hadn’t. He kept them.

He pinned them to his jacket with the rest, clustered together in the center.

Maybe Tommy hadn’t killed him on the festival’s day because even then, when they were choking on ash and the stink of death, he had known Schlatt was the last thing he had.

Tommy shook in his arms, screaming into his chest. Some insults fell past his lips, but they were empty of any fire that had blazed so brightly at the beginning of this hell they now existed in. Now, they were said out of habit, instead of spun from the ball of true hatred that had rested in his chest for so long. They were past hate. They had passed it a while ago. He had run out of hate to unravel from that ball, and now it was just a husk of itself, inflected with pain and trauma that he didn’t know how to handle. So he faced it in the way Tommy faced everything. With rage. He thrashed in Schlatt’s arms, screamed at him, beat on his chest and arms until he was tired. Then he pushed even further until he was so exhausted that his rage turned to liquid sorrow that dripped from his bloodshot eyes. All the while, Schlatt said nothing.

Tommy was all he had left too. While this wasn’t healthy, god, it was _far from healthy_ for the both of them, they had nowhere to go. They had no one else to turn to. They had lost everything when those bombs went off underneath that festival, rigged by an exiled president that was too far gone to be stopped. They were alone. In this city that they had snuck to, with different names—Jebediah and Theseus, father and son according to documents that Schlatt spent the last of his dime to have forged, though Tommy didn’t know that just yet and hopefully never would—they were surrounded by people who didn’t know a single thing about them despite what they chose to think. Here, where they watched the smoldering remains of l’Manberg on the news for a week before it finally became stale news, here, where Tommy was going to school for the first time since he had been fourteen and Wilbur had dragged him away to start that _goddamn doomed nation,_ here, all they had was each other.

Tommy hated it.

Schlatt hated himself.

Their friends and Tommy’s family were dead, they had been for six months now.

And this was the only way they could live for those that had passed.

In the wake of mistakes that were both their own and others.

Tommy’s breakdown lasted ten minutes. Then he had tired himself out, and he laid limply in Schlatt’s arms with the last of his tears rolling down his cheeks. Schlatt didn’t say anything for some time, letting the both of them catch their breath and gather the shattered pieces of the masks they wore twenty-four seven. They both knew that when they left this room, they would never say anything about this. They never did. This was how they lived. This was how they survived. They ignored it until it got too much, then Tommy would cry and scream and kick for the both of them, and then they would be left in the drop of the emotions neither of them wanted to face.

And like always, Schlatt would be the one to steer them back onto the path of lies.

“I got beef stew for dinner,” Schlatt said this time, voice barely above a whisper.

“Okay,” Tommy muttered back.

And that was that. For now.

**Author's Note:**

> The song is Rät by Penelope Scott.


End file.
